Blog > Field service

5 reasons to schedule maintenance technician routes in-house

3 April 2019 | 5 min read

For several weeks, fuel prices have been breaking records. Faced with the amount of time technicians spend on the road, which often represents half of their working day, and with no hope of lower prices in the near future, the operations managers are looking for solutions to optimise the routes of their mobile workers, and thus reduce their consumption.
Thankfully, artificial intelligence is now making it possible to develop tools that are particularly interesting for optimising the planning of maintenance or repair operations, while meeting the expectations of customers and field workers. 
Here are 5 reasons to adopt a route scheduling and optimisation software to manage your business and your technicians.

Scheduling balanced maintenance routes

There are many settings that operations managers must take into account when planning maintenance routes:

• Skills and qualifications of each service technician.
• Load capacity, engine and costs of each vehicle.
• Working hours, required breaks, holidays and sick leave of employees.
• Place of departure and arrival of each vehicle.
• Loading and unloading of equipment.
• Opening hours or availability of the end customer.
• Guaranteed response time.
• Duration of maintenance operations, especially on machine tools, industrial installations or telecommunication and energy distribution networks.
• Usual traffic conditions.

Determining the best routes by integrating all these factors is a real headache! Scheduling these routes by hand, or even using tools such as Google Maps or Excel, is not an efficient way to manage your business: wasted time, missed appointments, delays, upset customers, exhausted technicians, etc.

Good news: maintenance route optimisation software has been designed to manage these constraints. In concrete terms, thanks to algorithms and artificial intelligence, the route optimisation tool assigns maintenance operations to technicians in a few seconds according to the time and business constraints defined by the scheduler.

The AntsRoute system for managing the skills of technicians.

Limit the number of kilometres driven by technicians between two operations

“The best waste is the waste we don’t produce”. For several years, the zero waste movement, which aims to reduce the waste of resources, has become more and more important in every aspect of our daily lives. The home service sector is no exception…
The route optimisation software is also based on the idea that the best mileage is the one that is not travelled. The objective of these tools is therefore to assign maintenance or repair operations according to business constraints, while minimising the kilometres travelled between two maintenance steps. For this purpose, route optimization software offers several features:

• At the time of planning the routes, avoid the usual traffic jams.
• When assigning steps to field technicians, take into account the geographical distance from customers.
• If the technician lives in the immediate working area, schedule the start of the route from his home address.
• In the case of unforeseen events or last-minute requests, recalculate the routes to avoid unnecessary kilometres.
• If repair operations require the use of equipment, maximise the loading rate of vehicles to limit returns to the office.

The AntsRoute route optimization platform.

Enabling customers to book appointments 24/7

The use of a route optimization solution is also interesting for your customers, as the tool is available 24/7. In general, customers want to contact your customer service department to schedule an appointment during their free time, i.e. outside your opening hours. To meet this issue, some publishers offer online appointment scheduling systems. Let’s take the example of vientchezvous.com, the tool offered by AntsRoute:

• The customers can choose a type of service among those you have defined from the platform, for example, maintenance on a machine-tool, installation of an air conditioning system, installation of an electric meter, etc.
• Depending on the type of service, the customer is given an estimated time of visit.
• Then, the customer selects the date of visit and a time slot of availability.
• There are other options available. For example, you can determine a maximum number of kilometres allowed to add a task or custom fields that your customers will have to fill in when making an appointment.

The AntsRoute 24/7 online appointment system.

Reducing missed appointments

The unexpected absence of a customer during an appointment wastes considerable energy and money for service professionals: unnecessary kilometres travelled, frustrated technicians, equipment stored until the next visit, etc. To reduce the number of missed appointments, route optimisation software offers several solutions:

• An email or text message notification system is used to confirm the date and time of the technician’s visit to the customer. For example, sending a link that allows the customer to confirm or reschedule the appointment himself. In case of unforeseen events, the customer can click on this link to choose a new time slot.
• Furthermore, you can trigger a notification with the ETA (estimated time of arrival) 24 hours before the appointment. Once the field technician starts his route, you can set up an automated notification with a link allowing the customer to track the arrival of the worker in real time on a map.

The AntsRoute service rescheduling system.

Making it easier to write service reports

For most technicians, writing service reports is a time-consuming and tedious task. However, these reports are particularly appreciated by customers and facilitate the billing process. The use of a route optimization tool allows the automation of this service report. Thanks to the mobile application provided to the technicians, the field data is transferred automatically to the operations manager. In a few seconds, you can edit a report template in AntsRoute.

The manager could include the following data in the service report template:

• ID of the service company: logo, commercial name, registered capital, registration number, postal address, etc.
• Identification of the technician or field worker: last name, first name or vehicle registration.
• Contact details of the customer where the service operation was completed.
• Type of service: repairing a dishwasher, checking fire extinguishers, installing an air conditioning system, etc.
• Localisation géographique précise de l’intervention.
• Date, time slot and time of the service operation.
• Signature of the end customer.
• Photos taken by the field worker.
• Other customised fields: type of equipment used, quantity of products consumed, comments, advice for use, date of next maintenance operation, etc.

In just a few clicks, the information gathered by the field technician can be transformed into a PDF document. In addition, the AntsRoute route optimisation tool makes it possible to include a link to download this service report within a notification sent to the customer by text message or email after the visit of the technician.

The AntsRoute automated service report sending system.

Do you want to try our maintenance route planning and optimisation tool in practice? Go to this page to get a free 7-day trial with no commitment!